I’ve just returned from a meeting of the free-market Mont Pelerin Society in Morocco, the first time this laissez-faire group has met in the Arab world. The meeting itself was fascinating, and I’ll have more to say about that. But for the moment, a comment on the trip home, which left me yearning — not for the first time — for more private sector ingenuity not only in foreign lands, but at American airports.

I can remember a time when going to the airport was enjoyable. Incredible as it now seems, I used to look forward to it. Arriving at the airport was a prelude to adventure, or a welcoming portal for returning home. You often had to wait in lines, but you were not required to surrender an inordinate measure of human dignity. There wasn’t all that much reason to wonder if someone had mistaken you and your fellow travelers for a herd of cattle. These days, it’s all too common to exit the airport feeling like you’ve just escaped from the chain gang.

The specific airport I went through on this trip was New York’s JFK, though it would be unfair to focus solely on JFK when much the same goes on at every major U.S. airport I’m familiar with. In this instance, I got lucky on the immigration line, which for U.S. citizens, though not for hapless foreigners, was mercifully short. But I was foolish enough to require a connecting flight. For that, in the perpetual hodge-podge-cum-construction-site that is Kennedy Airport, it is necessary to exit one terminal and go through security clearance in another. Apparently it is a matter of continuing surprise to the Transportation Security Administration that airplane passengers turn up in the numbers they do; either that, or the TSA calculates cost-efficiency with a lot more regard for its own convenience than that of the folks who spend millions of man hours every year juggling their carry-on luggage in its lines.

Note — I’m not protesting the wholesale imposition of security checks, though many good articles have been written by now on how the TSA might better spend its resources zeroing in on the likeliest threats, and less on frisking pre-teens and great-grandmothers. I’m simply wondering if, given the TSA’s general approach to security, there might be ways to make it less absurdly onerous for the passengers the federal government is presumably trying to serve.

Clearing security in this instance meant joining a queue that stretched the length of the terminal’s main hall, and then inching along to the place where tickets and identification were checked. There, the real line began — with the preliminary line feeding into one of those zig-zag rope corrals in which you become part of a big rectangle packed solidly with humanity, shuffling first one direction, then reversing course, winding toward the actual security check.

After 45 minutes of that, you finally arrive at the tubs. Those would be the grimy plastic tubs, stacked in somewhat random locations near the x-ray machine conveyor belt, which you are expected to pry loose, align on the belt, fill with your belongings and steer into the x-ray machine — while moving along at a reasonable clip (on this occasion, someone’s carry-on bag jammed at the entrance to the x-ray; the passenger had already walked through the checkpoint, and it took a while for the nearest, yawning security official to notice and stroll over to clear the conveyor belt).

61 Comments, 36 Threads

1.
some of my best friends

there might be ways to make it less absurdly onerous for the passengers the federal government is presumably trying to serve.
Well, of course there are ways, but that’s irrelevant. ‘Presumably trying to serve’? The TSA has absolutely no interest in serving anyone’s interests but its own. Partly this is the price for federalizing thousands of marginally functional workers — all-too-often demoralized affirmative action dolts unemployable elsewhere (and yes, they often smell bad) — but mainly it’s just business as usual. Yet another federal bureaucracy that’s dug in, incompetent and unaccountable. Ho-hum.
The only difference: at the airport, the experience is direct, up close, in your face and personal (even inimate). Never was so much stupidity so institutionalzed and so visible. Can anyone objectively claim the TSA is an acceptable first line of defense, much less an effective one? Of course not. End it, don’t mend it.

The key to understanding TSA is that it was spun up when the US was at full employment, and especially at full employment for anybody who could pee in a bottle and pass a background check. Public employers all over the Country weren’t scraping the bottom of the barrel for qualified LEO candidates with a clean background and no bad habits, they were digging in the dirt under the barrel. Lots of public employers were sending recruiting missions to other employers’ cops and corrections officers. A TSA recruiter called me wanting to go to our prisons and try to recruit our COs; yeah, right! Likewise the management was recruited at the same time as public employers were struggling to keep their managers, so most of them were people that the employer was willing to let go. Alaska “lost” a couple of law enforcement managers to TSA, and their going away parties were the kind of party you went to just to make sure it was really happening.

Most people in that express line aren’t paying extra. Most of us are people who depend on air travel for our livelihood. My business requires travel – a lot of it – as I do business on four continents. So, yes, I have status, and the airlines expedite my passage just as any savvy business would seek to encourage a business customer who spends thousands of dollars a year over vacationers that might spend a few hundred every two or three years. That’s just good business.

Besides, I thought thinly-veiled cheap shots at the well-to-do were supposed to be the Left’s thing, eh?

No, it wasn’t a cheap shot–I’m happy that I don’t have to travel enough to have that privilege and don’t begrudge those that do. I was merely pointing out that the system won’t change because the airlines would lose the revenue it brings. Whether or not the government (in the form of the TSA) should differentially inconvenience folks on the basis of their frequent flyer status is another discussion, though.

They are already losing revenue from people who quit flying anywhere they can avoid it. Flying has become such a chore that it’s not even on my radar anymore for vacation ideas. The only reason I’ll fly anywhere anymore if for business, or if there is some sort of family emergency that necessitates it.

I work for a major airline and I stopped flying completely after the TSA geared up. I refuse to submit to that utter buffoonery.

The TSA doesn’t even exist for security reasons. It’s all eye-candy to make SOME people think that SOMEthing is “being done” to curtail the next catastrophic event.

But the muslim terrorists aren’t stupid. They delight in the revenue-harming TSA routine and also hold our nuts in a vise if we “profile” one of them. Honestly, the payouts for out-of-court settlements to muslims went suborbital in 2002.

Number of actual terrorist plots the TSA has curtailed since their inception=0.

The TSA can go away if it is known that several armed guards are on EVERY single flight. Put them in uniform, use the US Army. Let them be there with their M-16′s, locked and loaded. And no, a bullet hole in a plane window or skin of the aircraft will not suddenly decompress the plane like in the movie “Goldfinger”. That’s a myth. For the people who “don’t like guns”…don’t fly.

For the bombers…just pull every middle eastern man out of line at a checkpoint and examine their clothing. Profiling schmofiling. Not one of the hijackers on 9/11 was an 80 year old white grandmother or 5-year-old kid with a favorite dolly.

We are, as a nation, punishing the law-abiding for the acts of the lawless.

So yeah, just tell middle east muslims to go fly another airline, one that caters to them and wants their money. All other US-based airlines revenues would increase.

Insensitive you say? Bigoted you say?

Not at all. There is a war on and it’s very real. They want to kill us. All of us..even Hillary Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama, if they could. For the ones who are muslim who are angered at the profiling, I say, “Get out of the country…we’re not going to hurt you but the men of your homeland want to and therefore, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”.

My point being that even the efforts of “peaceful” muslims in this nation are nothing more than “please don’t pick on us, we hate you and everything you stand for and await the day that allah comes back and gives us everything we ever wanted…but please don’t pick on us”.

You cannot be a muslim and live in the US and obey US laws..the two are diametrically opposed. On the other hand, you can be a Jew or a Christian or one of many other religions and the concepts and doctrine seem simpatico. To be a muslim is to hate every other religion…so much that it burns a hole in your soul and makes you want to kill. This is why younger muslim men are the prime-movers. They are emotionally-charged walking hormones. Easy to get worked up and do the bidding of their tribal leaders.

The middle ages live in the middle east. They haven’t moved forward intellectually in over 700 years. 90% illiteracy…questions?

“On the morning of April 17, 1986, at Heathrow Airport in London, Israeli security guards working for El Al airlines found 1.5 kilograms of Semtex explosives in a bag of Anne-Marie Murphy, a five-month pregnant Irishwoman attempting to fly on a flight with 375 fellow passengers to Tel Aviv. In addition, a functioning calculator in the bag was found to be a timed triggering device. She was apparently unaware of the contents, and had been given the bag by her fiancé, Nezar Hindawi, a Jordanian.”

What do you expect from the most hated agency of a government supported by only 20% of the governed? TSA KNOW Americans hate them. So does the government, all three branches. None of them could possibly care less.

Still, stilletos to throats of family members, while up in the air, is the ultimate home invasion. Everyone on board has only one home in those moments, and that’s a lot homes affected at one time.

Profiling is good. Do it politely and there’s really no better way. It could suck if it starting happening in Africa to Whites, for example, but it could. Whites would have to build in the extra advance time. Seeing the majority Blacks profiling Whites and being polite and understanding, Blacks may win Whites’ loyalties and determination – to report on suspicious activites of Whites.

Do peaceful Muslims tend to report on unpeaceful Muslims? If so, I’ve never heard of it. I’m very curious to know who can be part of the solution and who wishes to be not bothered with neighborhood watching.

” in a country whose creative geniuses produced the airplane, the computer, the iPad, text-messaging and the ergonomic miracle of the Nike sneaker, the federal transportation authorities have yet to come up with anything better than those stacks of tubs.”

The difference of course is private enterprise vs government.

I suggest that we all hound our congresscritters and tell them that since the Obama Administration has declared the War on Terror over then we must also dismantle the instruments put into place for it, namely TSA and DHS.

I’ve felt for some time, the Republicans should be hitting hard at this TSA mess and what travelers have to go through. It’s an issue the average person can relate to. Romney should be promising to privatize the airport security system and fire most TSA workers. Just like high gasoline prices, it’s an easy issue to focus on.

Unfort, any attack on the tsa (by anyone) will be immediately met with shocked statements from the democrats, rinos, media etc. with “What, you want to make flying unsafe Again!?!?! Don’t you remember 9-11????”

And if it is a republican proposing the change, especially rino romney, they will immediately retract their statement and propose putting the TSA at every on ramp to make sure that no terrorist takes over a car on the interstate.

I live and work in China. The airports here are many times more efficient than USA, i also cringe when need to come back for whatever reason and go through US airports.
Screening here is quick, nobody is groped and children are not molested. The airports are clean and flights are updated regularly on screens every 20-30 meters and by audio in Mandarin and then English. Airports are clean, facilities are spotless, food is excellent.

Getting on the plane in China is straightforward and finished in a few minutes, it is mystery why it takes 20-30+ minutes in USA but 8-10 mins in China. All connecting flights are routed through airports so there is no additional screening.
Airline attendants are very hospitable in Asia, food ( real food ) is much better, on KLM airline attendants change their outfits every 2-3 hours on longer flights and absolute in their care of passengers.

I think the US airline industry will see their market share dwindle / collapse if foreign airlines are allowed to compete on domestic routes, there is no comparison in service and attention for the client.

“Getting on the plane in China is straightforward and finished in a few minutes, it is mystery why it takes 20-30+ minutes in USA but 8-10 mins in China. All connecting flights are routed through airports so there is no additional screening.”

One reason (probably the only reason) is that the Chinese are such dips&*ts that nobody is trying to blow them up on a daily basis.

And face it–to China, losing a couple hundred people is no big deal. Airline crash, shoddily-constructed public building collapsing in earthquakes, political prisoners tortured to death…meh. There’s still a lot of people left.

China’s more crowded than America, but our urban airports are more crowded than China’s. Ms. Rosette’s plane and ten other 777s landed at JFK within 45 minutes, and all the transferring passengers joined the line at security.

One thing that would help is lighter security for transfers from other countries. After you go through security in China, you go through again when you transfer at Narita then again when you transfer at JFK for Scranton. If their shoes and belts haven’t blown up during the first two flights, they probably won’t on the third.

The Japanese are tiresomely thorough, but they’re always polite. TSA guys bark a lot.

US airport security must be privatized. The TSA is rude, ineffective, and a drag on the economy.

Wow. That’s not the China I lived and worked in 10 years ago. It was anything BUT efficient, and clean is something fondly remembered.

But then, I’ve heard they finally got the new Guangzhou airport built, so I guess that extra line to pay the construction tax has finally been eliminated.

I guess they never figured out how to add a tax on an existing transaction. Having to go to 3 different lines – in completely different parts of the airport! – to pay for a ticket just didn’t make much sense to me.

With the Post Office—the first Third World government beach head—being shunned by increasing numbers of people, it was necessary to find another venue in which to begin training Americans to behave like serfs.

The airports were perfect; the most mobile and more upscale citizens could be humiliated at a juncture where they would lose money and experience serious life disruptions if they had any inclination to push back in any way.

That was part of the the point — something in article about people grabbing every which-way — over, around, under, and above you — trying to get everything into those damn gray plastic tubs. My laptop must be unloaded and PUT IN A TUB ALONE — ditto my dig. camera & cellphone. Another for my purse & shoes. And yet another one if I’m unfortunate to have to be traveling w/a coat (and once being told to take off a blouse “coverup” b/c I was on a long flight, and didn’t wanna wear a bra; I’m sure everyone around got a huge giggle seeing my boobs thru my thin white t-shirt — I know I sure did And of course my laptop bag/carry-on must go thru on the belt. That’s FIVE tubs (well, 4 + bag) I gotta deal with, no matter how you slice it. I’ve given up on 3 oz. “liquid” containers, and pack toiletries in my checked bag. At least that’s one less thing to deal w/in the interminable gray line. I’ve had a teensy, tiny eyeglasses screwdriver confiscated (it was less than 2″ long and would’ve broken if you tried stabbing someone).

I’m SICK of this crap, and it doesn’t appear to keep us any damn safer.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Shelinpvd
Hi Claudia — This is why I have a fear of flying (apologies to zipless Erica). Once my belt got hooked onto the luggage of the person preceding me in line. He was in a rush for his plane apparently and all I saw was my belt (unnecessary probably for its primary purpose, but integral to my amor propre nonetheless) flapping in his wake. I felt a wave of panic, which dissipated as he rushed back and handed it to me (with a sotto voce imprecation, but a good fellow, I hereby pronounce).

The most galling thing about the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA is that it will live in infamy as the creation of a Republican President with the complicity of a majority-Republican Senate and House. It is just such abominations as this, perpetrated on us all by “the Party of Limited Government”, that we now suffer under the monster Hussein, whose election was a reaction against Republican lunacy.

The Department of Security Theature and Touching Sensitive Areas (Dept Of Pedophile Training and Enabling) are likely to be abolished only when the US dollar joins Zimbucks as a worthless currency sometime within Obama or Romneys second term.

Actually, passport check in Houston last week was worse. Two stations open for returning citizens and resident aliens with a zig-zag back and forth line with 12 legs. Took 1.25 hours of slow shuffling to reach the point of actual entry check before proceeding to baggage claim and Customs. (They did open two additional immigration officers after 45 minutes, however.) Security re-screening was not quite as bad–only an additional 25 minutes of suffering with T (Thousands) S (Standing) A (Around). TSA isn’t the only inept branch of US airport bureaucracy incompetence, but they are hard to beat!

The Government could enable us to apply for travel clearances, which when granted would enable us to go right past all those security lines and board the plane. (Just like an FBI agent can show his ID to the security personnel and go right past TSA with all that hassle.)

A travel clearance would involve a thorough background check comparable to getting a Top Secret clearance: Your family and friends would be subject to checks. You would submit to a criminal background check, a credit check, and a check on all your foreign contacts. You might even need to take a lie detector test.

But once you’re through all that, you would be granted a pass that would get you right past all that airport security.

And like a security clearance, you would have to reapply for the travel clearance every 5 years or so.

And the fact that passing that background check would enable you to ignore the TSA and go right through, would be a powerful incentive to our young people to keep their noses clean and stay honest (so that they would get and keep that travel clearance).

Lots of us have the equivalent of the “travel clearance” you espouse in the form of a “Transportation Worker Identity Credential” or TWIC card. You have to have one if you’re a licensed mariner, many kinds of equipment operators, truck drivers, longshoremen, airport maintenance personnel or anyone else who needs to enter the secure area of an airport or seaport. You’re fingerprinted, digitally photographed for biometrics, and have a background check to get it, and it has to be renewed every five years. It seems the TSA isn’t set up to read them however. If you flash one at airport security AND the TSA goon knows what it is, you might get an easier time, but not necessarily.

I really didn’t like having the government be able to jerk me around they way they can over licensure, and I know several licensed masters who gave up their license rather than submit to the TWIC process. When they first started to impose background check requirements on airport maintenance and equipment operator personnel, we had the Devil’s own time with getting the state’s employees qualified; it is almost a job requirement that to be a heavy equipment operator, you must have a criminal record, so we had to shuffle highway personnel who could pass the BI on to the airports, and airport personnel who couldn’t pass the BI on to the highways and then deal with the union about who had what duty station seniority after the shuffle. We kinda had the upper hand, because if the union wasn’t cooperative in the transfers and reshuffling the seniority lists, we could just let the employee go since he was no longer qualified for the airport job, but sometimes that can cost you a LOT of money.

Let’s emphasize that this earlier quote from Non-Spectator is indeed correct:

…..”Fact is, the moose in the room is that profiling works. Ask EL AL.”

It’s been mentioned that El Al doesn’t have the volume of pax out of TLV that we do out of JFK, DFW or LAX.

Think of it this way……for those working at the check-in counters at curb-side or inside the terminal building, they will not have that same cumulative volume as right now, if ‘Profiling’ weeds out those standing in these long lines snaking around those stanchions and check-in lines, and has them picked out and re-routed to join their own check in line for “special handling”.

I’m not being facetious.

This permits the regular business travelers and those obvious Seniors and Mothers With Children to pass unhindered and without body-frisking, walking in their stocking feet and without their belts.

The reason for the 24 hour luggage quarantine for those profiled is for any possible timing devices on their wired explosives to go through their cycles.

If those so ‘Profiled’ object to this segregation, let them object and go elsewhere. We Americans are indeed at War against Islam.

We’ve got the A.C.L.U. and the C.A.I.R.-Tails wagging the United States’ Dog.

My Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D-ME) can be seen on Youtube railing against “Fat Cats and their Private Planes”, shortly thereafter she was caught coming off a private jet at the Portland Jetport! The jet belonged to Fat Cat billionaire boyfriend (and now husband) donald sussman head of the Paloma Partners hedge fund.

I once flew out of an airport (it may have been Newark..but I can’t remember, unfortunately) with a sense of humor in its security checkpoint. There were chairs and benches just after the screening area, with signage proclaiming it as the “Recombobulation Area.”

One time where “Bush’s Fault” is true. Remember him and his buddy Michael Chertoff created the TSA and from day 1 decided for the sake of political correctness to treat Granny the same as the Pakistani.

Consider this: While blameless upstanding citizens like you are being treated like common criminals, catering/cleaning personnel have free access to every nook and cranny on the aircraft, most air cargo is NOT screened, the full body scanners are child’s play to defeat with a variety of powerful explosives and, worst of all, the checkpoint itself is a target-rich environment for a bomber or shooter. Aviation security insiders, including former Federal Air Marshals and Red Team leaders, refer to TSA as the Terrorist Support Agency because it diverts resources much better spent on intelligence, law enforcement, and emergency response. These TSA clowns (and I’m referring to upper management, not the hapless screeners) are perpetrating a ruinously expensive and counterproductive fraud on the traveling public.

Sometime during the previous 3 1/2 years of the Obama rants, he talked about islam’s great contributions to the U.S.A. To me, modern air travel is the one and only real contribution these backward savages have made to the nation and to the world in general. Overpriced air fare, ridiculous and outdated security procedures, outrageous mistreatment of common citizens, inverse-racism in “security” personel hiring, an over-bloated “security” apparatus that is completely surpassed and uncapable of even coming close to its supposed goal, hundreds of millions of wasted man-hours in endless lines. Those are islam´s modern contributions to civilization, which millions of Americans both witness and suffer day in day out in every airport.

I’m flying to the States from Israel next week for family reasons, and I’m SO not looking forward to it. Besides the wating, the loading and unloading and yes, those grimy grey tubs, it’s just pain embarassing to see the contrast between the savvy, selective Israeli security and the slow, bossy bovine TSA.

We in Israel have only begun to catch on to proper consumer service mentality, so it is doubly ironic to see how cloddish, not to mention inept, the American airport procedure has become.

Thanks for that play-by-play. I’ll never fly again unless and until this BS is ended; unless I absolutely must. I have a conference in Las Vegas this weekend. I could easily fly (and cheaply) but I’d already chosen to drive – six hours. Now that I’ve read this I think I’ve chosen the quicker and easier path after all!